Author: Arvind Narayanan
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The Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available
The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable. If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity…
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“Private blockchain” is just a confusing name for a shared database
Banks and financial institutions seem to be all over the blockchain. It seems they agree with the Bitcoin community that the technology behind Bitcoin can provide an efficient platform for settlement and for issuing digital assets. Curiously, though, they seem to shy away from Bitcoin itself. Instead, they want something they have more control over and doesn’t…
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Bitcoin course available on Coursera; textbook is now official
Earlier this year we made our online course on Bitcoin publicly available — 11 video lectures and draft chapters of our textbook-in-progress, including exercises. The response has been very positive: numerous students have sent us thanks, comments, feedback, and a few error corrections. We’ve heard that our materials are being used in courses at a few…
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Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day
On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two. Considering how catastrophic a hard fork can be, the crisis was resolved quickly with remarkably little damage owing to the exemplary…
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The story behind the picture of Nick Szabo with other Bitcoin researchers and developers
Reddit seems to have discovered this picture of a group of 20 Bitcoin people having dinner, and the community seems intrigued by Nick Szabo’s public presence. It’s actually an old picture, from March 2014. I was the chief instigator of that event, so let me tell the story of how that amazing group of people happened…
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Bitcoin faces a crossroads, needs an effective decision-making process
Joint post with Andrew Miller. Virtually unknown outside the Bitcoin community, a debate is raging about whether or not to increase the maximum size of Bitcoin blocks. Blocks are created in Bitcoin roughly once every ten minutes and are currently limited to a size of 1 megabyte, putting a limit on the rate at which…
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Bitcoin is a game within a game
In this series on Bitcoin and game theory, I’ve argued that Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition and shown how we’ve had blind spots for years in our theoretical understanding of mining strategy. In this post, I’ll get to the question of the discrepancy between theory and practice. As I pointed out, even though…
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Bitcoin and game theory: we’re still scratching the surface
In an earlier post I argued why Bitcoin’s stability is fundamentally a game-theoretic proposition, and ended with some questions: Can we effectively model the system with all its interacting components in the language of strategies and payoff-maximization? Is the resulting model tractable — can we analyze it mathematically or using simulations? And most importantly, do…
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What should we do about re-identification? A precautionary approach to big data privacy
Computer science research on re-identification has repeatedly demonstrated that sensitive information can be inferred even from de-identified data in a wide variety of domains. This has posed a vexing problem for practitioners and policy makers. If the absence of “personally identifying information” cannot be relied on for privacy protection, what are the alternatives? Joanna Huey,…
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Nine awesome Bitcoin projects at Princeton
As promised, here are the final project presentations from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies class I taught at Princeton. I encouraged students to build something real, rather than toy class projects, and they delivered. I hope you’ll find these presentations interesting and educational, and that you build on the work presented here (I’ve linked to the projects…